Opposable Thumbs —

PC Battlefield 3 multiplayer: the evolution of aggression

Battlefield 3 may have stumbled in the single-player campaign, but the game's …

Infantry

Most players will spend the majority of their time on foot, and there are four classes to choose from when heading into battle. The Assault class focuses on offense, and has the added ability to drop health packs or revive fallen soldiers. Wrapping the Medic class into this package that focuses more on combat is smart, and creates a powerful and versatile class. (This is where I like to live.)

The Support class can lay down suppressing fire with its light machine gun while dropping extra ammo for others on the team. The bipod lets you steady your gun on different types of cover, which gives you extra accuracy while also decreasing your profile. If you put one of these in a chokepoint, it becomes easier to hold an area of the map, and the game now awards points for suppressing enemies with your fire.

The lighting effects and level design often work together brilliantly

Engineers have the weapons needed to directly engage with vehicles or to repair damaged vehicles. They can also use anti-tank mines for area denial or for placing traps. If you want to gain ranks quickly, you can grab a lot of points by repairing vehicles.

The Recon class offers long range support via scoped rifles, but can also drop mobile spawn points or paint targets with a laser in order to help other classes attack large targets.

You need a strong combination of all four classes to be effective, and within the broad strengths of each class, players can specialize further to find a niche.

You become more powerful as you level up and unlock new weapons, gadgets, and abilities, but you'll be able fight well from your first round as long as you're smart. Luckily, everything you do gets you points, so even poor players will be able to gain levels and equipment in short order. You can get points by spotting enemies, healing your buddies, dropping ammo, or simply finishing a round. Good players will level up much quicker, but the game is balanced in such a way that everyone will be able to get ahead and see the cooler weapons as long as they're persistent.

This is another key reason why the multiplayer is so much better than the single-player game: the options given to you as a soldier are nearly limitless, and the action plays out on beautiful maps with an impressive sense of scale. You'll be firing at the attacking force, dodging grenades, calling for ammo, hoping your snipers take out the guy that keeps killing you, watching as jets and helicopters duke it out above your head and wreckage falls from the skies. You'll duck behind cover as tanks rumble past, then go prone to sneak through enemy lines before knifing someone to take their dogtags. You can be the gunner on a helicopter and rain death down on the heads of those fighting below, or make strafing runs with your jet.

Good rounds contain dozens of cinematic and exciting firefights, with you and your friends as the stars. This is the best kind of game, where even when you lose or do poorly you're always having fun, and the point system offers constant reward for your actions.

Voice chat

One of the game's shortcomings is the lack of built-in voice chat (to say nothing of the weak party chat). I'll step out of the way and let community member tpg0007 explain why that's such a pain:

For those that remember, Battlefield 2 had perfectly working built-in voice communication. By default it had one channel for each squad, so only squad members could talk to each other. An extra channel was devoted to communication between squad leaders and the commander. This naturally fostered teamwork and made the experience better, even with total strangers. The quality was sufficient for very demanding and team-oriented gaming groups such that for most casual rounds there was no need to bother with third party solutions.

Fast-forward 6 years and, with all the improvements in technology and bandwidth upgrades, we have no built-in voice comm, just a clunky Party Chat that doesn't integrate with the game much at all. For all the vastly superior graphics and gameplay over its predecessors, it really amazes me that DICE just gave up totally on having a working and well-integrated voice comm for their flagship game.

There will be those that say Ventrillo, Teamspeak, Mumble etc. makes it less necessary to have an in-game VOIP system. This would only be true if somehow these external programs were able to intelligently move people into different channels according to team and squad. There is no substitute for a proper, well-built in-game voice comm for improving the experience.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The multiplayer makes it all worthwhile

The single-player game borders on the terrible, the launch could definitely have been smoother, but when you start to dig into the multiplayer portion of the game all those complaints fall away. This is a large-scale war game with a suite of vehicles and large maps, with up to 64 players fighting for domination at once. It's a beautiful, atmospheric slice of insanity, and it's hard to know what to expect from one round to the next.

What exactly is he firing at?

Battlefield rewards teamwork and communication over run-and-gun, and action gamers who aren't used to this more holistic approach to combat will need to adjust their expectations. The new engine shows just what is possible on the PC, and it blows away the console versions of the game in every way. While it may take a few more days for things to even out in terms of stability, Battlefield 3 promises to be one of the best online experiences this year.

The Good

The four classes work well and make sense

The vehicles provide many tactical possibilities

Jets are back!

The maps are varied and interesting

The Frostbite 2 engine provides amazing visuals and physics

The point system rewards different styles of play

Battlelog makes it easy to track your progress

The engine allows for everything from the sun to dust to hurt visibility, leading to extra tension

Unlocking new weapons and items is addictive

The Bad

Why does the chat box take up so much space on my screen?

The minimap is hard to read at a glance

Some maps become cramped with 64 players

Stability still needs to be improved

There are many game modes, but it's hard to find servers that are running something that isn't Conquest or Rush. This may also work under "The Good"

The Ugly

If you use the tactical light, you are a terrible human being, and are more of a danger to your own team than the enemy